1. Field of the Invention
Methods and apparatuses consistent with the present invention relate to Web Services (hereinafter, referred to as “WS”), and more particularly, to methods for transmitting a WS message to a plurality of receiving nodes, and apparatuses for processing a WS message.
2. Description of the Prior Art
With the increasing necessity to realize worldwide cooperative electronic environments, it is necessary to provide a next generation electronic automatic business system, and proper facilities for such a system. In order to realize the cooperative electronic environments under this new scheme, a technology called “Web Services” (hereinafter, referred to as “WS”) has been developed. In this WS, the “web” represents a typical network and “services” represents a comprehensive concept including not only electronic interfaces but also distributed applications.
A WS corresponds to a program interface for an electronic business system which operates based on various industry standards including Extensible Markup Language (hereinafter, referred to as XML)-based standards, thereby facilitating mutual use of services.
A WS includes both technical contracts and business contracts. The technical contract defines a series of operations and data types used for performing these operations. Further, the technical contract defines protocols for a WS and proper communication models. The business contract defines business-related metadata (e.g. category or taxonomy, support phone numbers) associated to services, service level agreements, licensing models, and others.
For example, a WS may include stock quotations accessible by Universal Resource Locators (URLs), product catalogs published through the Internet, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) message channels, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-based authentication agents, and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) objects. All of these are network-accessible components for performing specific functions; these components may be integrated into a powerful automatic business system.
That is, in the Information Technology (IT) industry, evolution from machine code to programming languages and client-server programming, and further to object-oriented component models has been implemented. Recently, further evolution to service-based distributed applications, which cannot only be used dynamically, but which can also be flexibly combined, has been implemented. A WS corresponds to this service-based distributed application.
For such a WS, various standards such as a WS-Router, a WS-Referring, a WS-Event Scheduling and a WS-Security have been proposed. Among these standards, a WS-Addressing is used for setting transmitting and receiving nodes for a WS message.
When a receiving node is detailed in a WS message by means of a WS-Addressing, a network apparatus (e.g. a gateway or a router), for message relaying, searches for the receiving node detailed in the message. If the network apparatus finds the receiving node, it transfers the message. However, if the network apparatus fails to find the receiving node, it returns an error message. Such WS-Addressing basically considers one-to-one communication while not considering one-to-multiple communication.
With the spread of WS, it is possible to provide and use multilateral services which consider a home network in addition to Business-to-Business (B2B) services and Business-to-Customer (B2C) services. Since WS according to the prior art is based on a one-to-one service call, repeated operations including message generation and transmission must be performed by the number of receiving nodes in order to implement a WS call for the receiving nodes. For example, when a user attempts to check the states of each device constituting a home network by means of an external WS, an external computing device used by the user must repeat a WS call for each device. This may result not only in an increase in the operations of the computing device for processing messages, but also in a waste of network resources.
Korea Unexamined Patent Publication No. 10-2004-39039 (Method and Apparatus for Control Message Multicast in an UPnP-based Network System) discloses protocols defined in a Universal Plug and Play (hereafter, UPnP)-based network, including HTTPMU/SOAP layers on a User Datagram Protocol (hereafter, UDP) layer, which is constructed in such a manner that the same control message is multicast to a plurality of devices. However, since technology disclosed in the Korea publication No. 10-2004-39039 uses general multicast technology, a receiving node of a message may change according to the situation. Therefore, this technology is not suitable for WS environments in which it is difficult to classify the receiving node into a fixed group.
Further, WS-Management provides an event transmission scheme using a multicast, but this is not sufficiently secure. In addition, this is a scheme suitable for a small scale network capable of performing a multicast.
That is, these conventional technologies are not suitable for wide network environments such as the Internet.